10/23/2026
WHY DOES MY MULE/HORSE ACT LIKE THAT?
Equine memory is an interesting study. The memory process is both episodic and associative, meaning they remember the event and the emotional weight attached to it.
Over my years working with horses and mules as well as dealing with people who have experienced trauma I’ve seen incidents that seemed so spontaneous and irrational, I could only wonder…where in the world did THAT come from?
I’ve worked with horses that couldn’t accept you wearing a cowboy hat…but if you took it off, it was a different animal.
One horse would become violent if you faced her and lifted your hat brim while on her left side. If you moved one foot the other side of her nose, she had no reaction.
(She’d been smacked in the face by a trainer out of frustration when she ‘misbehaved’)
Another, that at the sight of you merely lifting a flex-tip whip from the ground would literally attack.
She’d been laid down dnd whipped when she kicked at a farrier. She had good reason to act that way. A few days later, I could walk around her, ground-tied and pop the whip all around her.
Mules that had been friendly and easy to handle having a medical procedure or even a bad hauling/handling experience that soured them on humanity.
It’s much similar to PTSD in humans and dealing with it is somewhat similar, too.
You have to figure out (sometimes obvious sometimes not so) what might be the root of the issue. What did they experience, to what magnitude and was it a one-time thing or an on-going issue?
They can’t verbalize but they DO speak to us. If we’re familiar enough with behavior as a species or even know the individual animal, we can often discern what might be the cause.
Depending on the intensity, duration and frequency of an impactful experience, the time and energy it takes to resolve the issue will vary.
Let me state; I am not an animal behavior expert. I have no letters to follow my name.
My most successful approach has been to get the animal to re-experience the event or approximate it and support them through it.
Takes time, patience and the ability to see the situation from the animals viewpoint.
There are those times when you simply have to rebuild the trust and relationship from scratch as with rescues or animals with which your unfamiliar on an individual level.
In my experience, mules tend to have stronger or more intense opinions about people, places, events and things.
The MAIN thing to remember is the animal has that opinion for a reason. It doesn’t matter if WE think it’s reasonable or rational. We have to regard the animal’s opinion and work from there.
